Trump Is No Truman

If an American President finds himself up against it there's a good chance he or his supporters will turn to Harry Truman for guidance. This was true of George W. Bush. It was also true of Barack Obama. It was even tried with Hillary Clinton.

So it was only a matter before Donald Trump's turn would come. Enter NRO's own Victor Davis Hanson:

It took a half-century for historians to concede that the feisty Truman had solid accomplishments, especially in foreign affairs. Even his vulgarity was eventually appreciated as integral to the image of “Give ’Em Hell” Harry. But if he’d had access to Twitter, or had a Robert Mueller to hound him, the loose-cannon Truman probably would have self-destructed in a flurry of ad hominem tweets.

An obsessed special prosecutor would have followed Truman’s checkered pre-presidential career all the way back to Kansas City to uncover likely unethical behavior.

Yet in the end, Truman proved successful because of what he did — and in spite of what he said.

The only thing Truman and Trump have in common is the first four letters of their last names.

Hanson describes Truman as "obscure" and "a non-entity" who was a product of Tom Pendergast's political machine. This is simply wrong. Although known as the Senator from Pendergast when he first came to Washington, he would earn his chops in the early 1940's as Chair of the Special Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program which scrutinized war profiteering by defense contractors. Its work was so effective that it would soon be popularly known as the Truman Committee.

Hanson writes, "When Truman took office after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he knew relatively nothing about the grand strategy of World War II. No one had told him anything about the ongoing atomic-bomb project. But for the next seven-plus years, Truman shocked the country."

What Truman did was learn everything he could about the war including the Manhattan Project. Although Truman had no formal education after high school, he was a voracious reader. In her 2012 biography Citizen Soldier: A Life of Harry S. Truman, Aida D. Donald writes:

He was a great reader on his own, boasting that he read all 3,000 books in the local library. A centrally important work in his own private library was Charles F. Horne's Great Men and Famous Women. Of great men, Harry most admired Alexander The Great, Hannibal, Charles Martel, Cincinnatus, and Robert E. Lee....He read Caesar, Cicero, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain. He later saw some merit to Lincoln, after discounting family prejudice....Harry's love of history stood him in good stead, as he referred to great men's affairs while discussing weighty issues when he was in the army, or when he was settling world problems with other leaders, including Joseph Stalin, who was impressed.

If Trump can't handle a one page written brief then how can we even begin to compare him to a man who read 3,000 books in the local library? Aside from Robert E. Lee, would Trump know Cincinnatus from Cincinnati?

"In the pre-Twitter age, Truman could not keep his mouth shut," boasts Hanson. One of the examples he cites is the firing of General Douglas MacArthur:

Truman liked to trash national icons — including the military that had just won World War II. He reportedly said of MacArthur’s firing: “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

The problem here is that Truman did not utter these words during his presidency. In fact, they were not revealed until nearly a year after his death with the publication of Merle Miller's Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman.

 

Truman may have occasionally used salty language, as he did when he commanded Battery D artillery brigade in WWI. Could you imagine Truman publicly saying a POW wasn't a hero because he was captured?

Truman may have dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but did he ever tell an audience he was going to bomb the sh*t out of the Japanese?

Truman may have threatened a music critic with bodily harm, but did he ever say demeaning things about Eleanor Roosevelt or Mamie Eisenhower's physical appearance?

Truman might have enjoyed looking at Lauren Bacall's legs while playing piano, but could you imagine him two-timing Bess Truman with Gypsy Rose Lee much less paying off her attorney?

Could you imagine Truman boasting about his wealth, crowd size or ratings? You couldn't because Truman had none of those things. All he had was his reputation. For all of Trump's wealth, crowd size and ratings, he will never have Truman's reputation. Put simply, Donald Trump is no Harry Truman.